News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Child welfare in DC: Ask for housing help, lose your kids?

One of the
many false claims from America’s latter-day “child savers” – to use the term
their 19th Century counterparts proudly gave themselves – is the
claim that “we never take away children because of poverty.”

Point out
the fact that most state laws define neglect as lack of adequate food, clothing
and shelter – a perfect definition of poverty – and they’ll reply that in some
of those states the law specifically makes an exception if the lack of adequate
food, clothing and shelter is caused by poverty.

But, of
course, the child savers have all sorts of ways around petty annoyances such as
what a law actually says.

Recall the
case from Texas in which a family was torn apart for lack of housing and
the flack for the child welfare agency blithely explained that the children
weren’t being torn from their loving parents because they were poor, but because
they were in an unsafe living environment.
“You could live in a mansion and be in an unsafe living environment,”
she explained.

And now we
have the spectacle of Washington, D.C., enacting what looks for all the word
like a cruel, calculated plan to stop families in desperate need of housing
from seeking help from the D.C. government.

As the D.C.
blog Policy and Povertyfirst
reported in May, the plan is simplicity itself. When someone calls the center that is
supposed to help homeless families, the center promptly turns around and turns
them in to the Child and Family Services Administration (CFSA) – the agency
that investigates child abuse and takes away children in the District.

The Policy
and Poverty blog notes that this is done despite the fact that

As the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless notes … District
law specifically states that “deprivation due to the
lack of financial means … is not considered neglect.”

CFSA claims
it hasn’t actually taken any children as a result of these referrals. But as the Blog also notes, CFSA has admitted
that of all the children it tore from their families in 2010, 35 were placed
primarily because of “inadequate housing.”

And what
CFSA will admit is only the tip of the iceberg.
As
I’ve noted previously on this Blog, an independent evaluation by CFSA’s own
Citizen Review Panel found a serious and widespread problem of needless removal
of children from their homes.

In a
Washington Post story in June,
Ruth White, executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child
Welfare – and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors – cut to the heart of
the matter:

What’s unusual about D.C., White believes, is
that the overburdened city is using its new warning to reduce the number of
families in its system by scaring away parents … who might be able to scrape by sleeping on
couches, with friends and family or in their cars.

“These people are simply walking in the door for
assistance and people don’t have shelter and they’re saying, ‘We’re calling CPS
on you? ‘ It’s ridiculous,” White said. “It is scandalous. I’ve never seen it
done this blatantly.”

Lawyers for the Washington Legal Clinic for the
Homeless said they first began hearing from families who had been threatened
with investigation this winter and now many of their clients avoid seeking
help.

One woman who recently testified at a[D.C. city]
council hearing wept as she described her fear that she would lose custody of
her younger son, a 16-year-old honor student, after the family was evicted from
their apartment in April and ended up sleeping in Anacostia Park.

“I’m just so afraid,” she said. “They tell me
they’re going to come and have my son taken away. I can’t deal with that. My
boys is all I know.”

Most
disappointing is who it is who turns out to be behind this cruel policy. In the District helping homeless families is
the responsibility of the Department of Human Services. That agency is run by David Berns, who earned
a national reputation as a reformer for transforming child welfare, and
significantly reducing foster care, in El Paso County, Colorado.

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About NCCPR

The members of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform have encountered the child welfare system in their professional capacities. Through NCCPR, we work to make that system better serve America’s most vulnerable children by trying to change policies concerning child abuse, foster care and family preservation.